Life cycles of popular cryptographic hashes

This chart shows the various life stages of the better-known hashes. You might notice a lot of changes happening in 2004; this is the year that Xiaoyun Wang, et al. published a paper named, simply enough,Collisions for Hash Functions MD4, MD5, HAVAL-128 and RIPEMD. (I’d heard rumors that MD5 had been broken and watched the webcast of the announcement while eating popcorn.) One of my favorite quotes from this paper: “Our attack can find collision [in MD4] with hand calculation.” This introduces another stage in the life cycle of a cryptographic hash function: The stage when finding collisions doesn’t even require a pocket calculator.